Last week, North Korea test-fired multiple missiles, including a possible failed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and hundreds of artillery shells at sea, as South Korea and the United States held six days of air drills that ended on Saturday. The North’s military said the “Vigilant Storm” drills were an “open provocation aimed at deliberately escalating tension” and “a dangerous war exercise of a very high aggressive nature.” North Korea’s military said it conducted simulated attack activities on air bases and aircraft, as well as a major South Korean city, to “crush the enemies’ persistent war hysteria.” The flurry of missile launches included the most ever in one day, and comes amid a record year of missile tests by nuclear-armed North Korea. South Korean and US officials also said Pyongyang has made technical preparations to test a nuclear device, the first time it has done so since 2017. An official of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Monday that a South Korean ship recovered debris believed to be part of a North Korean short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) that landed off the South’s coast last week. It was the first time a North Korean ballistic missile landed near South Korean waters. The South Korean Navy salvage vessel used an underwater probe to recover the parts, which are being analyzed, the official said.
DISPUTED CLAIMS
North Korea’s military said it fired two “strategic” cruise missiles on Nov. 2 into waters off South Korea’s Ulsan, the southeastern coastal city that is home to a nuclear plant and large industrial parks. South Korean officials called that claim “untrue” and said they had not spotted any missiles near there. Analysts said some of the photos released by North Korea’s state media appeared to be recycled from launches earlier in the year. The operations also included the launch of two “tactical ballistic missiles loaded with cluster warheads,” a test of a “special operational warhead that cripples the enemy’s operational command system,” and an “all-out combat sortie” with 500 fighter jets. according to a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency. Five hundred fighters would represent nearly every dedicated fighter aircraft in the North’s inventory, which seems unlikely given that many are 40-80-year-old aircraft and not all are repairable or maintained in the active fleet, said Joseph Dempsey, a defense researcher at the International Institute. for Strategic Studies. “The number of 500 seems exaggerated or at least misleading,” he said in a post on Twitter. North Korea’s General Staff of the People’s Army (KPA) accused Seoul and Washington of provoking a “more volatile confrontation” and vowed to counter their drills with “prolonged, decisive and overwhelming practical military measures.” “The more persistent the enemies’ provocative military moves continue, the more thoroughly and mercilessly the KPA will deal with them,” it said in the statement.
NEW POLYMA?
Photos released by state media appeared to show a new type or variant of the ICBM that had not been reported before, analysts said. “It’s not clear in their statement, but the plan doesn’t match what we’ve seen in the past,” said Ankit Panda, a missile expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He said the launch shown may have been a development platform for evaluating missile subsystems, possibly including a vehicle for multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), which allow a missile to drop nuclear warheads at different targets. “This is definitely an ICBM-sized missile,” Panda said. George William Herbert, an assistant professor at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and a missile consultant, said the images showed what appeared to be a new nose on North Korea’s Hwasong-15 ICBM, which was first tested in 2017. The nose has a different shape and appears larger than needed for the 200- to 300-kiloton nuclear device shown in state media and apparently tested in 2017, he said. Herbert said the shape is more suited to a single large warhead than to multiple smaller warheads like a MIRV. Kim called for the development of both larger nuclear warheads and smaller ones that could be used in MIRVs or for tactical weapons. Report by Hyonhee Shin and Josh Smith. Editing: Daniel Wallis, Diane Craft and Gerry Doyle Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
